Portals and heartbeats

Chapter 1

Stella Strange liked coffee shops for the same reason she liked quiet hallways and empty rooftops—no one expected anything from you there.

You could sit in the corner with a warm cup and pretend you were just another student trying to survive New York, not the daughter of the Sorcerer Supreme, not the girl with a sling ring tucked away like a secret heartbeat against her ribs.

She pressed her pencil to the page and let her hand move the way it always did when her mind got too loud.

Circles.

Layers of circles.

A ring within a ring, symbols like delicate stitches around the edges, spirals that should have meant focus but always ended up meaning panic.

The portal designs weren't something she had learned in a class, exactly. They were something she had always been drawn to—like her brain had been trying to remember a language it had heard once in a dream. Stella had been doodling them since she was a kid. Back then, they were just pretty patterns.

Now she knew better.

Now she knew they were dangerous.

She paused, biting the inside of her cheek, and stared at the page like it had personally betrayed her. Her father made it look so easy. He lifted his hand, turned the sling ring like he was opening a door, and the world obeyed. Stella tried and her portals either fizzled out like a dying spark... or snapped open too wide, too fast, like a mouth.

Like something hungry.

The bell above the coffee shop door chimed and Stella didn't look up. People came and went all day. A barista called out an order. Someone laughed too loudly at a corner table. A blender roared, then stopped.

Stella drew another circle.

She was shading a crescent-shaped symbol near the edge when something bumped her table.

Not enough to knock her drink over—thank God—but enough to make her notebook slide.

Her heart lurched as the page nearly tipped off the table, and then—

A hand caught it.

Fast.

Reflex fast.

Stella's eyes snapped up.

The boy standing there had messy brown hair, a backpack slung over one shoulder, and a guilty look on his face like he'd just stepped on a puppy's tail. He was holding her notebook carefully, like he knew it mattered.

"Oh—uh—sorry," he said quickly. "I didn't mean to— I almost—your notebook was going to—"

He stopped, exhaling hard, and handed it back. "Sorry."

Stella took it, pulling it close. Too close. Her fingers curled over the page, covering the circles like they were something alive.

"It's okay," she said. Her voice came out quieter than she intended. "How much did you see?"

His eyes widened a little, like he wasn't expecting her to ask that.

"Uh— not a lot," he said. "Just... circles. Like, really complicated circles." He lifted both hands, palms out, in a surrender gesture. "I swear I wasn't snooping. I just didn't want your stuff to face-plant."

Stella's mouth twitched. She tried to stop it, but a small smile slipped out anyway. It was hard to stay annoyed when someone looked that sincerely terrified of upsetting you.

"Hey," she said, softer. "It's okay."

He let out a relieved laugh and his shoulders dropped. "Okay. Good. Because I've had a long streak of knocking things over lately."